by Marion Nestle

Search results: walmart

Jun 6 2019

Food industry: efforts to fight hunger?

I keep saying that food companies are not social service or public health agencies and should not be viewed as such.  They are businesses, and everything they do must aim to promote sales and returns to investors.

BakeryandSnacks.com, an industry newsletter to which I subscribe, has collected several of its articles on the anti-hunger activities of its member companies.  Is this public health or public relations?  Read and decide.

May 15 2019

Online shopping for SNAP participants—the wave of the future?

The USDA recently announced a new pilot program for New York State participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).  They will now be able to use their Electronic Benefit Transfer cards to buy foods online.

At first glance, this seems like a terrific idea for solving problems of limited access to healthy foods (“food deserts”), and it gives SNAP participants more options and easier access.   Yes!

But participants will have to pay service or delivery charges with their own money.  For this and other rules, see the SNAP Online Purchasing pilot webpage.  Will they end up paying more or less for foods?  We will have to see how the pilot plays out to know.

At the moment, one clear conclusion is the benefit to Big Retail.  Amazon and ShopRite will run the program in New York City.  Walmart will run it upstate.

Amazon, for example, is promoting this pilot project with a video.

Nevin Cohen, writing in Civil Eats, has the best analysis of this program I’ve seen so far.

For those who have worked for decades to make healthful food available in low-income communities, the pilot has the potential to be a game-changer, enabling them to shift attention from physical access to supermarkets to the economic inequality at the root of food insecurity. But if the SNAP pilot will actually make people healthier, six questions demand attention [his article discusses these in detail]:

1. Does Online Shopping Mean Healthier Choices?

2. Will Shopping at Home Make People Less Active and More Lonely?

3. Will Local Food Retailers be Able to Compete?

4. Will it Be Bad for Worker Health?

5. Will it Increase Environmental Health Problems?

6. Will it Create a Digital Food Divide?

SNAP, Cohen points out

is moving online, whether we like it or not, and ignoring the fact that in a few years some 40 million people will change their grocery shopping habits would be a serious mistake. As the physical barriers to food fall away for SNAP participants, it will be up to policymakers and the public health community to ensure that the food retail sector—virtual as well as brick and mortar—supports healthy diets and true access for all.

 

Jan 3 2019

FoodNavigator.com on what’s happening in the dairy industry

I think this collection of articles from FoodNavigator on the dairy industry is especially clear in revealing three notable trends: (1) the ongoing decline in milk consumption, (2) a more recent decline in yogurt consumption, and (3) an increase in production, availability, and marketing of dairy products high in fat.  Take a look:

 Special Edition: Dairy innovation

It’s been a challenging year for many dairy brands, with continued weakness in fluid milk and yogurt categories and growing competition from dairy-free alternatives. But there has been no shortage of innovation, spanning everything from ‘intentionally less sweet’ high protein yogurt launches to  whole milk and even ‘triple cream’ offerings as fat roars back in some parts of the category.

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Aug 3 2018

Weekend reading: I Am Not a Tractor!

Susan L. Marquis.  I Am Not a Tractor!  How Florida Farmworkers Took on the Fast Food Giants and Won.  ILR Press, 2017.

Susan Marquis is the Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an unlikely person to be writing this book.  Her background is in military defense, which she describes as “guns and bombs” (her previous book was Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding US Special Operations Forces).

As she explains, it was inspired by Barry Estabrook’s article in Gourmet about the harsh treatment of tomato pickers in Florida, later incorporated into his superb book, Tomatoland.  Estabrook blurbs her book (“detailed, academically rigorous, and impossible to put down”).  I agree.

The book tells the story of how the Coalition of Immokalee Workers fought for higher pay and, after much struggle, got it.  Here’s how to find out what it took to get retailers like Walmart and Ahold to agree to pay one cent more per pound—and what a difference that made.

Marquis’ take home lessons:

  • Real change has to come from the workers’ themselves (it can’t be led or forced from the outside)
  • To change systems, you need to understand them
  • To gain allies, you must have a cohesive, consistent, compelling story
  • Leaders must have courage, objectivity, creativity, and persistence
Jun 12 2018

Biggest global food companies, according to Forbes

Forbes has published a ranking of the top 2000 global companies (all kinds, not just food) by a composite score of revenue, profit, assets, and market value.

Forbes summarizes some of the information for food processing companies.  By its measure, Anheuser Busch, Nestlé, and PepsiCo are the top three.

Coca-Cola, however, ranks #209, a big drop from last year’s #86.  It did not have a good year last year.

You can sort the list by name or category.  I did that for four categories: Beverage, Food processing, Food retail, and Restaurants.

Walmart does not show up as a food retailer; Forbes considers it a Discount Store, even though food accounts for nearly half of Walmart’s revenues, nearly $200 billion a year.

Here are the food, beverage, retail, and restaurants that show up as among the top 250 companies, worldwide.  I only included sales and profits in this  table; you would have to add in assets and market value to understand the ranking system.

Food, beverage, retail, and restaurant companies among the biggest 250 companies worldwide.

RANK  COMPANY SALES

$ Billions

PROFITS

$ Billions

24 Walmart, US 500.3*  9.9
41 Anheuser-Busch, Belgium  56.4  7.9
48 Nestlé, Switzerland  91.2  7.3
102 PepsiCo, US  64.0  4.9
103 Unilever, Netherlands  60.6  6.8
126 Kraft-Heinz, US  26.2  11.1
209 Coca-Cola, US  33.7  1.4
211 Mondelēz International, US  26.2  3.2
239 Danone, France  27.8  2.8
241 McDonald’s, US  22.3  5.4

*About 40% of sales are from food.

This is why Walmart is the elephant in the food-business room.

May 29 2018

Pay inequality in the food business

The New York Times describes the enormous gap between the pay of company chief executives and their employees.

Its two printed pages of lists compare CEO total annual compensation (in millions of dollars) to the median pay of employees (in $ thousands).  

Median means half the employees get that amount or more, but the other half gets that amount or less.

I looked for the data on companies that produce, food, beverage, or agricultural products.  I could not find many (where is Coca-Cola?).  Several of the companies of interest—Monsanto, Sysco, and Procter & Gamble, for example—list the pay of the CEOs, but not employees.

Even so, the comparison is striking.  Repeat: CEO pay is in $ millions; worker pay is in $ thousands.

COMPANY CEO TOTAL ANNUAL

COMPENSATION,

$ MILLIONS

MEDIAN WORKER PAY,

$ THOUSANDS

Mondelez   42.4   42.9
Weight Watchers   33.4     6.0
PepsiCo   25.9   47.8
Walmart   22.2   19.2
McDonald’s   21.8    7.0
Archer Daniels Midland   15.8   57.3

The Times interactive lists provide calculations of the ratios (and its account explains the limitations of these data—part-time work, etc).

If you need quantifiable evidence for income inequality, here it is.

May 1 2018

Amazon and SNAP: a taxpayer-supported alliance

The Intercept published an account last week pointing out that:

  • Amazon will soon accept grocery orders from SNAP (food stamp) participants
  • One third of Amazon employees are paid so little that they depend on SNAP for food
  • Taxpayers also subsidize Amazon with tax breaks, subsidies, and infrastructure improvements

Amazon pays its employeesmedian (half above, half below) annual salary of $28,466.

The New York Times  points out that critics

have produced studies that say Amazon’s warehouses — which employ more than 125,000 full-time workers in the United States — don’t increase total local employment because of losses in other sectors. They also question the wisdom of subsidies to attract them. The American Booksellers Association, which represents independent bookstores, recently published a similar report on Amazon’s economic impact.

Amazon generated nearly $178 billion in online sales in 2017, its income grew by 27.8%, and it made $3 billion in profit.

Now we know why.

Jun 30 2017

Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods: a roundup

I’ve been asked to comment on Amazon’s proposal to buy Whole Foods.  So much has been written about it that it’s hard to add anything new.

My immediate thoughts:

The facts: Amazon offered $13.7 billion to buy Whole Foods.  This may seem like a lot of money but it’s just 3% of Amazon’s $470 billion holdings.

How did this happen?

What are the implications?

Effect on retailers: Their stocks dropped immediately.  Amazon is serious competition.

Disruption: This may be a major disruption to grocers, but this industry may have had it coming.

Organics: Whole Foods specializes in organics; producers already cannot keep up with demand.  Farmers will have to grow more, but if Amazon imports organics that will open up possibilities for fraud.

E-commerce: this could increase the value of physical stores if done right, as well as online grocery shopping.

Food chains: Amazon on top.

 “Conscious capitalism”: The end

Maybe, feeding the world (says Alice Waters)

Better food for all?  Civil Eats considers this question, but asks will this do what Walmart does—force lower wages for workers and lower prices for farmers. 

Humor: Alexa: tell me some jokes about Whole Foods’s prices, drones, and Amazon’s ruling the world.